Newly Opened Records Show Fears Over Air Quality After 9/11 Attacks

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In the months after the Sept. 11 attack , New York City set up a hotline for residents and workers in Lower Manhattan who had questions about what to do, and how they could get help, as they eased back into their lives downtown.

A resident of 22 River Terrace in Battery Park City — less than a mile from Ground Zero — asked if the city could test their apartment’s air quality.

The operator responded that the city was “in the process of obtaining funding for testing indoor air quality” and advised the caller to wet wipe and mop.

A disabled woman who had health issues as a result of the attack called about cleaning her apartment at 90 Beekman St., even closer to the still-burning debris. It had never been cleaned, she said, because insurance lapsed on the building.

Another person was “unhappy with cleaning recommendations,” the log noted. The caller was “angry,” it said.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks at City Hall about releasing records on public health issues relating to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on Sept. 8, 2026. At right is comedian Jon Stewart, a longtime advocate for 9/11 first responders. (Mayoral Photography Office/Ed Reed)

These logs are from the Lower Manhattan Air Quality Hotline, which the city operated through the end of May 2002 before the federal government took it over.

They were released Tuesday as part of the first tranche of Sept. 11 documents by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, after settling two lawsuits filed by advocates who have pushed for decades to learn what the city knew about air quality following the terror attacks.

The first batch is more than 170,000 pages, filled with emails, reports and news clippings following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center 25 years ago.

“Everyone knew. And now it’s very clear that the city knew as well.”

“Today is a long time coming,” Mamdani said at City Hall, standing alongside dozens of people who pushed for the release of this toxic dust data. They included comedian and host Jon Stewart, who became an outspoken champion for first responders’ healthcare.

To Stewart, the documents reaffirmed suspicions harbored by many New Yorkers that they had been misled about whether it was safe to return to Lower Manhattan in the days after Sept. 11.

“Everyone knew. And now it’s very clear that the city knew as well,” he said.

“And rather than take the steps to ameliorate the damage that would cause to its citizens and to the people that were down there, they instead covered it up to get back to business as usual,” Stewart said. “But unfortunately, after 9/11, business will never be usual again.”

Smoke rises from the rubble as demolition crews remove the remains of the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York on Oct. 31, 2001. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Mamdani stopped short of directly criticizing any of his predecessors, but said government actions had sickened New Yorkers.

“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” he said. “And then, when they began to contend with the symptoms of the illnesses that followed, the government that had not hesitated to send them into harm’s way was nowhere to be found.”

The release of the documents, Mamdani and others hoped, would allow more people to realize they may have become sickened by the toxic air.

Adams accuses Mamdani

A spokesperson for former Mayor Michael Bloomberg declined to comment. A spokesperson for former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani didn’t respond to a request for comment, and neither did former Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Through his spokesperson, Todd Shapiro, former Mayor Eric Adams said Mamdani “is exploiting the pain of 9/11 families, survivors and first responders for a political headline.”

“Any documents related to post-9/11 air quality must be released and scrutinized — but Mayor Adams did not create, conceal or control records from prior administrations,” Shapiro said.

The group 9/11 Health Watch had appealed what it called Adams’ “yearslong effective denial” of a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2023 for documents, including some that were released Tuesday.

The ‘Harding memo’

The documents are searchable by the public through a special portal , which will have more documents added to it throughout the year, according to Steven Banks, the city’s corporation counsel.

Banks was asked about releasing the documents at his City Council confirmation hearing earlier this year, and said Tuesday it’s “a testament to what is possible when government chooses to solve the difficult problems as opposed to ignoring them.”

The initial documents include what’s known as the “Harding memo,” written in October 2001 by a City Hall staffer, Michelle Goldstein, to then-Deputy Mayor Robert Harding. In it, the staffer shared concerns about the potential massive legal liability from toxic air exposure and improper safety gear at Ground Zero.

Hotline transcripts

There’s also paperwork related to the Lower Manhattan Air Quality Hotline, which was found in some of the 68 boxes discovered last year in the Department of Environmental Protection’s offices.

The hotline data showed the ordinary fears of New Yorkers: sending their kids to school in Lower Manhattan or returning to office buildings that weren’t properly cleaned. They called to ask about air tests inside and outside, about elementary schools and about how to clean their HVAC systems.

One resident left a voicemail about their bronchial infection. Another caller inquired about a dormitory for the New School for Social Research. At one point, operators thought their hotline was getting crossed with an Off-Track Betting line because they received five gambling-related calls in a single morning, according to an email.

One operator, who still works for the city and asked to remain anonymous, started her job at the Department of Health on Sept. 11. She was sitting on the front steps of the department’s office on Worth Street when the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Ash covers a street in downtown New York City after the collapse of the World Trade Center following a terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Bernadette Tuazon)

She had already spent months doing outreach and fitting first responders for personal protective equipment when she started shifts answering the hotline.

“We were synthesizing the information from a lot of different agencies,” she said. “We had all gotten some basic info in toxicology and understanding what the risks were and what they could be.”

Sometimes the callers were angry. “When you’re scared and you’re not getting all the information you need or you don’t know what’s going on, of course you get angry and frustrated,” she said.

But she didn’t take it personally.

“All of us lived and worked in New York City,” she said. “In the moment I saw people working incredibly hard in really difficult and challenging circumstances to both collect the information and then share that information as rapidly as possible.”

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